A varnam is one of the hardest phase of the learning process in the
shishya-parampara (student learning process) within the Karnatic classical
school, a grounding in fundamentals of sorts. In my opinion, that intricacy
makes them more soulful and complete as compared to, say, a kriti.

Varnam's are further classified into "pada" varnam and "ata-tala"
varnams. "Viriboni" is one such Ata-tala varnam set to Bhairavi ragam by
Pacchimirium
Sri Adiyappaiyer

If you are thinking this is just five lines, dont. Ata-tala varanams are very
complex pada-varnams and we usually take 25 minutes to finish it. Yeah 25
minutes to practise five lines of lyrics!

Ata-tala varnam, as the name suggests, are set to a 14-beat cycle, far
different as compared to a varnam set to Adi tala. That complexity in beats
makes it complex and yet soulful, thanks to the complex svara structures.

They are also used for the Bharatnatyam dance recitals, where the
ragam-tanam-pallavi is more intricate as compared to a regular varnam and it
could go on for as long as 35-45 minutes, depending on the choreography and the
visual story-telling the artiste-dancer indulges in.

I've always wanted to attend a scientific Foss hacking session in Python and
last Sunday, I made that idea come true. So how do you even begin to describe a
fantastic Sunday that got over even before it started. Well, that was how it
felt in retrospect...

Having kick-started the Pydata-Pandas workshop-sprint, it was annoying to catch
a viral bug the week before the sprint-workshop one is organizing - talk
about increasing the stress levels. The cold weather did add to my discomfort,
but could not dent my enthusiasm - I was organising my first event on a whim,
at short notice in a new city (country?) where I hardly knew anyone, not to
mention it was at the start of the Holiday Season! See what I mean about having
perfect timing ... gee, what was I thinking!?!

Aahz announced it on the Pythonsprints
site and soon enough Sunday dawned bright and shiny. I reached the Pivotal Labs
Manhattan office to find Asheesh calmly sprawled on the ground calmly munching
on croissants and sipping Java (err..coffee). We had planned to come in a
little earlier incase someone needed installation help. I had not eaten any
breakfast but I was more stressed than hungry as this was the first event I was
organizing in an alien country. I declined the yummy snacks and nervously
wondered if Chang would show up?; ... will all the people who registered show
up?; ... this was the Sunday before the Christmas week and maybe everyone may
decide to sleep-in or go off on a holiday; would Saturday have been a better
choice, or maybe we should not have kept it free - what if nobody came despite
registering, what if .... oh, well..the monkey-mind was hard at
work :-P

Disastrous thoughts were stronger than the currents of the Niagara, when Chang
and Emily made their appearance and I managed to make small conversation as the
stress ebbed away. Things were sunnier when JT arrived and opened the doors,
leaving me with less time to indulge my monkey-mind. We all got busy setting up
the space for the event, arranged the tables and chairs, checked if enough
power-points were available, checked the video camera, set up the name tags,
did a recce of the adjoining kitchen.

Pivotal Labs has the nicest open kitchen, well-stocked with a variety of
snacks, fruits, nuts and a large variety of drinks that cater to all taste
buds. I hate carbonated sugary drinks and artificial flavouring which restricts
my choice to drinking H2O, but to my surprise there was coconut water. Now if
you liked your pint of beer while coding, the PL kitchen had that too. A big
shout-out (Thank You :)) in gratitude to Pivotal Labs for being the most
gracious host an organizer could ask for!

Back to the tiny tasks bits, I got a print out of Chang's presentation so he
could have his notes handy during the workshop. The machine was a Mac, so
ipython files would not work. The solution was a PDF. When you are organising
an event like this there may be small miniscule things that can hold up your
event so you would need to plan and budget time for them. Someday I shall
collate my thoughts on 'how to organise small events' like workshops and
sprints in a new blog entry.

A little past 10 AM, I introduced Chang She to the assembled attendees, and
Chang kick-started the Pandas workshop by walking us through the Pandas data
structures for 1-dimensional, 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional data. He moved on
to DataFrame components and indexing, accessing data via files and Databases,
Broadcasting and some basic Statistical computations.

It was not all theory, as all the participants were following and experimenting
on their laptops, in part, thanks to Asheesh's excellent "Laptop
setup guide", enabling attendees to come with configured machines, making
it easier to get going with Pandas. They worked on the small tasks and
exercises that Chang gave out as the session progressed.

Soon it was lunch time and Asheesh being in-charge of the food (and the
finances), did an awesome job of keeping us well-fed - we had Vegitarian wraps,
Egg wraps and Hummus wraps, and Salads. That was the first meal of the day for
me and over lunch I got to know a nice group of interesting people; with the
conversation meandering around scientific programming with Python, Julia and
R-language, different programming environments, our offices, work, etc..

Small talk and big lunch over, it was now time to Sprint - not literally, just
the mental hacking kind! Chang split us up into small groups of 2-3 people and
it was very exciting to see the attendees pored over their machines, trying to
tackle Pandas bugs.
Working in small groups of 2 (or 3) people meant Chang could walk around and
talk to each group to help and guide them. He was ably aided by Asheesh who
also went around helping other sprinters, answering questions, etc...

The sprint went on till evening, when finally at 1745 hours, Pivotal Labs had
to ask us to leave. Yeah, we had so much fun that they had to tell us it was
time to go home !

For those who love numbers, enjoy these statistics. We had 31 registrations
(Capped at 30, but we had a waiting list that accommodated the cancellations.)
and 18 people attended the Pandas Workshop-Sprint, with 7 female hackers, which
makes it a cool 39% female attendees :-)) Infact, three female
researchers had to opt out due to other obligations during the holiday season.
The most amazing email was from a person who missed the registration by a few
minutes, wanting to drop by on Sunday morning hoping for last minute
cancellations. _That_ was the kind of response I would have expected for a
talk, never for a Sprint!

Ofcourse, this entire event would not have been possible without our generous
sponsors. A huge Thank you to:
* Chang She for conducting the workshop.
* Pivotal Labs, our generous host for the day -Thanks JT for spending an entire
Sunday with us.
* The Python Software Foundation, whose generous grant for "Breakfast+Lunch and
Asheesh's travel from Boston", kept us fueled and
on track all day.
* O'reilly Media, who gave all attendees a free E-book copy of Wes McKinney's
"Pandas for Data Analysis", including a 40% discount on the
print copy of Wes's book.

Positively thrilled to announce the one-day hands-on intensive Pandas workshop and sprint for
new contributors with Chang She - a Pandas core-dev leading the sprint.
Its 4 am'ish and I just finished spamming a few mailing lists, IRC channels and
thought I'll write a blog-post if I must be energetically expensive.

Given that there was a PyData conference in NY a few weeks ago, this was the
place to be at, so I pinged the diversity list for speakers, and of course IRC
- The response was phenomenal and unbelievable - People went out of their way
to make my wish come true - they tweeted, emailed, chatted on IRC, gave me
advice, introduced me to core-devs, volunteered for the event, pinged friends
for hosting space, encouraged me to write to the PSF/sprints funding, ... and
on and on.

I have so many people to thank that there will be a longer blog post, post the
event ...yeah, the list is long but maybe if I get started now (and my
apologies if I have missed your name ... feel free to gently lart me, its
4AM and I am sleep deprived :)) ... Alphabetically-ordered XXXL THANK
YOU'S to: Aahz, Asheesh, Brian, Carl, Chang, David, Diana, Jesse, Josh Knowles,
Krissy, Meghan, Sheila, Steve, Wes.

Last weekend, at this moment, I was giving a technical talk at Pycon Canada, my first. Right now, I am
still wallowing in the fun and warmth of friendships (some old, some new) that
thawed the cold Canadian weather. It was the most mentally simulating,
energy-packed experience I've had. Oh, wait...I say that about all the
PyCon conferences I attend - Well, this is my second PyCon but the first
speaking gig, and it has, as before, been about meeting some of the smartest
people and having the most intellectually simulating discussions with them,
learning from them and having a whale of a time. Wish all my weekends were this
much fUn! The Python community is known for just that - their fabulously
fantastic community, which attracted me to the language (no, I love the syntax
too) and has kept me hooked.

Thanks to the change in climate (thanks Sandy!), I had a migrane that got worse
on the plane ride on Friday morning and I was much happier landing in a
slightly warmer and dry climate in Toronto. Enjoyed the shortest ferry ride of
my life and reached the Metropolitan Hotel by 2pm to find the Google
goodie-bags waiting for us at the hotel room - such a nice surprise, thanks
Google! Went for a long walk in the afternoon - its a relief to be able
to walk around and see the city and its inhabitants without men bumping into
you, or tripping yourself over jutting stones on the sidewalk (erm...whenever
Indian roads have a sidewalk), the calmness of being able to stop and click
pictures without worrying about someone "accidentally" (it always is, isnt it?)
feeling you up while you were just standing there admiring a monument ........
Oh, well... never mind, you get the picture!

Later that evening, there was a casual mixer event enabling attendees, speakers
and some awesome sponsors (one of
them being Google, whose Diversity grant made this conference a reality for me)
to register, hang out, and chat before the conference, with food and drinks at
the venue bar open to all... and oh, we ate some yummy
cake. Mixers before your conference is a smart way to avoid the rush and
long lines that will queue up to register on the morning of your conference, a
nightmare if you are short on volunteers.

I managed to reach the venue thanks to Suzanne (who I randomly stopped on the
road to ask for directions, instead she ended up dropping me off till the venue
- its amazing how one meets kind souls), met Laura at the registration desk who
saw that every attendee had their badges and tags. Nicola introduced me to
Sheila, who suddenly morphed into a real person instead of an email address
with a picture attached to it. In a global distributed space knit via bits and
bytes, our identities are unequivocally tied to an email, twitter, G+/FB
account now.

Met more interesting people and had the longest discussion with Mark Eichin and his friend Laura, on a range of
technical topics, mobile technology, languages, and not excluding the mandatory
talk about the DFSG and licenses in FOSS - talking legalese is the most
important thing when you meet a DD (j/k). After the party, I returned to the
room, met Laren, another diversity grant recipient room-sharing with me. By
now, the pounding in my head was worse and the pain would not let me sleep, so
I kept re-editing my slides till I was tired enough to sleep.

On Saturday morning - Day One of the conference, Laren and me walked over to
the venue and I went of into the Green Room where all the speakers were
pampered with food, some space to sit and work with you laptop,
more food, chat with other speakers while having even more
food, but I had no taste buds so I took three Advil's and gave my
firsttechnical
talk. That done, I was free to go and watch talks but instead I went
off to be a volunteer - this is the easiest way to make friends with some
really cool people within the community who welcome and appreciate your
contribution and efforts. Its also very humbling to see the PyConCA board
members and speakers who volunteered to carry in the lunch boxes the caterer
had dropped off.

Post lunch, I attended the "Numerical
and Scientific Computing with Python" tutorial by David, listened some
great speakers, spoke to more people, had interesting discussions on NLP and
linguistics with Mike and DWF, and
before I knew it, it was the end of the day, which means more food - snacks and
drinks were available at the bar. Did I mention that Pycon-CA pampers you with
food and drinks all through the day. At every break, there was something to
munch on. Every where I looked there were food boxes, fruits / salad boxes,
cookies, coffee, tea, drinks, water bottles, cakes, tacos, samosas (I noticed
that those ran out really quickly as compared to the salads which is not
surprising), strawberry and chocolate, juice, .... ummm..ok, you get the
picture. You were very well-fed and taken care of. At one point I counted the
number of laptops Vs. the food boxes on the table. Guess which was
outnumbered!?

Sunday morning, being the second and final day of the conference, I attended
talks on Graph databases
in Python and
Persona (identity/privacy, which is important to me) and later, Greg Wilson and a bunch of speakers in the green
room had an interesting conversation on education and knowledge (or
the lack thereof) in the current education system, what role
do Universities and schools have to play within the system - are they redundant
with their monolithic rigid structures,MOOC's,
their pro's and cons, and how the internet and technology is changing the
education system, whether sites like Udacity andCoursera (did you know that their business model allows them to sell
your personal details to publishers like McGraw Hill and their ilk, who have
apparently signed on the dotted line) are imparting knowledge to their users
and learners at the risk of their privacy? Where exactly is creativity, mental
development, critical thought, knowledge and learning today? That was more food
for thought than the food around the table. Post lunch, I morphed into a Runner
- yeah, its that person who runs behind each speaker! Katie and me were deputed
to the Main hall speakers and got to see all the talks, including lightning
talks, ending with Fernando's
(not-to-be-missed) closing keynote.

Videos:

No matter how hard you try, you cannot attend every fantastic
talk out there. When Carl sent across the video link to me, I was stunned by
the excellent production quality. The first thought that crossed my mind was
"Wow, that is a second career right there" and sure enough it is - these
excellent videos are brought to you by nextdayvideo.com :

Wow, this post has gotten too long. Among all the things, I admire the
organizational abilities of the board the most. The conference had awesome sponsors too, one of them being
Google, whose Diversity grant made it possible for me to attend the event.
Initially, when my talk was accepted, I had planned book the bus tickets in
advance so that I could stretch the grant money to enable me to attend both the
days of the conference. When I mentioned this to Diana, she worked her magic,
enabling me to cover my flight bookings and also the hotel stay within the
grant. Amazing team! Kudos to the PyCon-Canada team.

"How do I start contributing to Libre Software?" is a very common question
(I asked that too) one comes across on most FLOSS lists. Today, I posted the
following on a private list and was asked for a public link, so here goes:

SWOT

There are so many Libre software projects to choose from, that choosing one
can be quite confusing when you are starting out. Do yourself a favor and take
a few moments to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats) analysis before you decide to jump onto the Libre
software bandwagon.

Its better to give yourself time to think (or write down) which technical
area or field interests you: Which language do you want to program in? Is
it frontend software or backend stuff? Web programming or something else? Do
you like writing system software or application level software? Or, do you like
libraries, prefer working with algorithms/statistical applications, etc..

Once you have figured out your field of interest, its easier to shortlist
something and get started on finding a project to work on.

FINDING A PROJECT

As I mentioned above, there are so many Libre software projects that its
overwhelming at the outset. Having figured out your field, dont randomly
visiting a bugtracker and try to solve bugs, which is not a bad idea if you
have only a few hours per week. However, if you want to wade a little deeper,
try using Google to your advantage - read, Google Summer of Code. This recently concluded
program, has a ready list of organisations to choose from and the 2012 list is
available at: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2012
.

Besides these few hundred GSoC Orgs, Gnome runs its own outreach program for
women: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2012 and
then, there is the European
Space Agency, which is (sadly) only open to EU students. However, if you
are interested in working outside of the SoC span, projects are always
interested in contributors and would welcome your efforts 24x7x365. That said,
these SoC tasks require a longer commitment in terms of time, so you need to
decide what you want to do.

FOUND A TASK, WHAT NEXT?

After you have searched Melange (or ESA) for keywords of your choice, visit
each organisations Ideas page, where you will find a list of tasks ranked as
per preference or difficulty level (This entirely depends on the Org).
Remember to cross-check with the Melange page if the task has already
been completed via GSoC, or not. If a task is still available, find
out what is required to get started on it and prepare a short abstract. This
will help you to..
- figure out the development stack vis-a-vis your skillset,
- realise how much time and effort is required to bridge the gap, if any
;
- prepare a timeline estimate. (Dont obsess over this as its just an estimate
and it will vary if the Org changes any requirements.)

These done, talk to the Org - always, Always, ALWAYS talk to the Org
_before_ you start work on anything. Just because a task is listed on
the Ideas page does not mean its a part of their workflow (which can always
change), nor is the opposite true. The best way to find out is to talk to them,
first. Again, remember that these SoC tasks require a longer commitment in
terms of time.

COMMUNICATING WITH LIBRE COMMUNITIES

Most Libre projects have their own communication channels. This could be via
Mailing lists or Forums, including IRC channels on dedicated servers or on
freenode. Its important to work with them via these public channels and that
means learning to communicate and not worry about asking silly (psst..there are
none) questions. Communicating with the core developer and/or mentors and
community of users is crucial - they can be an invaluable source for ideas and
helpful hints.

Many projects have separate lists (and IRC channels) for users and
developers. Join them and introduce yourself (or lurk around to get a hang of
how things work) and when you are ready, do talk about the task you want to
work on. A development mailing list, where the core developers would be
available, is distinguishable via the "*-devel" mailing address. Same is true
for IRC channels - If you like CLI tools, try Irssi or Quassel if you want a
GUI client. Pick your poison from this list of IRC
clients.

EXPERIMENT WITH THE DEVELOPMENT STACK

Finally, and most importantly, you must be comfortable working with the
software the project uses - that means, you should be able to clone and get the
software to install and work on your local machine. Here, communicating with
your Org helps - You can ask for help if you have hardware or software issues,
clarify installation and dependency issues, etc... No software works flawlessly
(else, people would be out of jobs :)) and Libre software is no exception - the
only difference being "software development on a libre/public scale".

Another aspect of getting familiar with the development stack is
familiarizing yourself with the projects internal system - Since, each project
uses its own bug
tracker, DVCS,
Wiki for documentation, Email/Forum and IRC communication system ; take some
time to get familiar with each of these. If you plan to stick around for any
length of time, you would be using some, or, all the software stacks they use
on a regular basis.

Your transition from newbie to active contributor is a lot faster when you
are comfortable with the development stack. Doing your homework will give you
the confidence required to grok it enough to start working on the code-base,
suggest changes or solve bugs, etc..

I hope these suggestions help you find your niche learning shell to
contribute to, and of course, welcome to the Libre software. Have fun!

Am breaking a long hiatus from blogging to report a really sad news ::
Kenneth Gonsalves, (lawgon on IRC), a long time Free/Libre software (especially
INPycon) contributor is no more. When I first saw this
mail in my inbox, I could not believe it was true.

My first interaction with Lawgon was via the LinuxChix mailing lists. Back
then, I was surprised to see posts from a "nilgiris" domain name and I assumed
he was an USA-NRI actively posting on their lists. Later, via the Mumbai-LUG
list when I had tried to install his "avsap" accounting software ~ it would not
work on my machine and I wrote him a mail with the gory error details. Finally,
in 2007, I met "lawgon" on IRC, ##linux-india. I was never an IRC person but
when he got banned from the channel, I had a long argument with Devdas (f3ew on
IRC) about it - mostly because I felt that the rules were not clear, and even
more importantly, felt that rules ought to be implemented uniformly, sans
cronyism.

A few moons later, I met
him in real life for the first time at the first formation meet for
Fosscomm and sat next to him through the whole meeting. In my eyes, he was
like a father-figure, a person you can talk to freely, someone who didnt see IT
and FLOSS as the road to self-publicity, fame and riches. Rather, he saw Libre
software as I did - of, for and by the people. It was nice
talking to him and hear the stories via the work he had done at
NRC-Foss/AU-KBC.

He was someone I respected because unlike some FOSS people, he actually
wrote and released his code publicly: https://bitbucket.org/lawgon, and worked
within the community, had no illusions or superiority complex about himself.
Most of us in the FLOSS community were his kids age and in my interactions I
didnt find him patronizing nor elitist in "demanding" we respect his age. Quite
the opposite, he never hesitated to ask for technical help from people younger
than him, quite ego less. His fiery rants on his blog (http://lawgon.livejournal.com/) always
made me chuckle. There are very few blogs I follow and thusfar, I've read every
post of his - strong opinions peppered with character. His own!

In his mailing list communication, he could be quite blunt in his comments,
and I've had my moments sparring with him on the lists, but if you take a
moment to look behind the scenes, his honesty and sincerity towards Libre
software showed. I remember his mail asking me not to leave the Mumbai LUG list
and my response on the kind of Libre community (the lack thereof) we foster,
which, to my surprise, found an echo with him. I remember his long email rant
(about someone which I wont get into in public) where he mentioned "...and I'm
scared of you" ~ yeah, I too scrubbed my eyes and smiled at his droll sense of
humor, as I typed out an apology.

I remember his IRC comment that he wanted his daughter to meet me and my
curiosity piqued ~ this was long before I had met him in real life but after
meeting me in his blog he used the word "legendary Svaksha" and I was surprised
that it was not "fiery Svaksha" given my frank replies. Going by the
stereotypical Indian fathers attitude, I very much doubted if they would want
their daughters to be like me - Or maybe it was his sense of humor - I'll never
know!? Some moons later an email asking for some information on "legal rights
of women in India" for her coursework, IRC discussions on virtualenvwrapper (he
asked me why I wanted to use it and for a moment I thought he was testing me --
I could not imagine a long-time Python developer (atleast a lot longer than me)
asking me that, unless he was pulling my leg or if it was an interview
question?), discussing a recent Python workshop he held at Kerala, and so many
other interactions... {Edit1:: His recent mail on the open
source business model has some excellent advice for wannabe
entrepreneurs.}

I was hoping to meet him at InPycon this year but now the conference wont be
the same without him. I hope and pray his family finds the strength to carry on
without him and may his soul rest in peace! You will be missed Lawgon..and try
not to kickstart a "GPL Vs. BSD" argument in heaven!

Using (or talking) about R makes me want to rant sometimes and if you've
ever written a line of Fortran code, you would have certainly wanted to
experiment with a new language stack for scientific programming. Yup, I am
aware of scipy, numpy, sympy, sage, et al.. and despite their existence, when I
came across this language
for scientific programming in January this year, sheer curiosity** made me
give it a spin.

Starting the year with a scientific language that has clean syntax and some
nicer documentation made me feel warm and fuzzy, until, it refused to build due
to a BLAS dependency. That problem didnt last for long though, as I was able to
pull a fresh commit which had fixed this issue. Its nice to see an active team
having interesting (read, sane) development discussions. A Matlab coder has
opined thus about Julia while an R
programmer has done a comparison between Julia and R.

After some trial-and-error, I managed to grok its syntax, enough to rewrite
an old fortran code in JuliaLang [Julia is still pre-release and I ran Version
0.0.0+1331430882.r69af from Commit 69afb7032d (2012-03-11 07:39:42)]:

I was avoiding blogging this code snippet here - code belongs in a DVCS, not in
a blog. But I've intentionally not uploaded this program to github because its
not fully functional yet -- see my comments within the code. When I cross-check
the results from the
fortran code (or as mentioned in the WP
page --Geometric_interpretation.) I find "sqrt" isnt working as it should
-- I need to figure out the syntax a wee bit more, so I'll push this when it
works perfectly.

** PS: That it was named after a woman (or atleast I like to think so) isnt
what prompted my interest! No kidding!

The Indian government agency that runs the Income-Tax portal "incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in" has
very thoughtfully provided an electronic filing facility for its citizens which
enables all tax-payers to file their Tax returns without a trip to the local
Income Tax Office. However, their thoughtfulness only extends to Windows users
as they have provided the e-forms only in the MSOffice .xls format which will
not run any macros on a non-Windows platform. Now, I have not used Windows for
many years now and having been forced to pay for a half-baked edition
pre-installed on my laptop, I could not wait for my warranty to finish and free
up that disk space.

Last week, I found two Open-Office hacks for the ITR forms 1 and 2 at:

However, the Open-Office supported ITR-2 form from KSEB is
borked -- has locked cells which will not work nor retrieve macros in
Open-Office and many fields and cells are protected, making it impossible to
enter data so that the Tax macros work properly. The ITR-2 form (available from
the above link) has some errors in the conversion for Open Office --In Part B -
TI in Computation of total income. It does not allow you to enter any figures
in the following fields:

1. Salaries (6 of Schedule S)
2. Income from house property (C of Schedule-HP) (Enter nil if loss)
3. Capital gains
4. Income from other sources
This prevents the macro from tabulating the Total (Example: A + B +Total of (I)
for all fields), due to which its not possible to tabulate the final tax
payable.

Does anyone know how to get locked cell macros to work in Open-Office? All help
and pointers to get these hacks working on Open-Office would be a big help.
TIA.

I've been using TiddlyWiki for some
years as a personal wiki space and although the first version was a bit
clumsy about saving and searching ; today, it is the most re-usable, portable,
easily shared self-contained wiki that you can find to manage your local tasks
and information.

Mainly, I use TiddlyWiki to maintain notes, store and manage links. While
there are online sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon which facilitate users
sharing weblinks, they dont have the highly customizable features that
Tiddlywiki has ; namely, the freedom to customize, edit pages and add oodles of
content (ex. store phone nos, or other personal data which you dont want to
store on a public space). Sometimes, I want to add IRC conversation snippets or
installation notes as a future reference for something I had tried previously
and found useful and it makes it very easy to add new tiddlers instantly. This
level of fine-grained user-level customization is not available in any online
site.

I wanted to share this so that folks who like wikis for the ease of editing
can use Tiddlywiki instead of struggling to maintain local wiki installations
on their servers. Dont forget that Tiddlywiki is the only wiki that does not
need a server-side implementation and runs entirely on your browser.

TiddlyWiki is built on a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and you can start by
downloading an empty.html page to start using it. Here is the sourcecode if you want to contribute new
features, and they also have a community
space, some tutorials, a bug
tracker, and many freely available themes to customize your local wikipage.
In short, the uses are as (un)limited as your imagination is. Enjoy!